


Rey Stabs Kylo Ren and He Dies

by jamwrites



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Badass Rey, Gen, Lightsaber Battles, Movie: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, POV Rey (Star Wars), Rey Hates Kylo Ren, feel free to use it for IX you don't even need to pay me royalties thx bb, jj if you're reading this it is a summary of why kylie is Bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-16 18:52:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19324036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamwrites/pseuds/jamwrites
Summary: Rey kills him. She gives a TED Talk on why he sucks and then he dies. That's what happens.--“And if, after all of senseless war and rot and ruin, you expect to get anything, anything from me other than an offer of death or prison, much less compassion? Or love?” She shook her head. “Then you’ve been driven far more insane than Snoke could ever accomplish.”“Rey...the Dark Side--”“Understands its relationship to the Light. But you? You don’t understand anything."





	Rey Stabs Kylo Ren and He Dies

**Author's Note:**

> This is not a pairing piece. Rey kills Kylo Ren because he is a fascist loser. I want to be explicit in my intentions here, and my intentions are: Kylo Ren dead. Writing this was necessary catharsis after putting my clown shoes back on for IX. I am not sorry if you don't like it.

Freezing rain lashed the top of the cruiser like a vengeful god, trying its best to sweep Rey off its slick hull and into the depths of the planet’s sky below. But she dug her heels in and stood strong against the wind. She would not falter. Not now, not when the ship was rising through the atmosphere, carrying its precious cargo to freedom, not when they were all so, so close to the peace they had fought for.

Not when she still had a job to do.

“You can’t win!” A little way from her was a hulking black shred of a shape, its frayed edges whipping around in the gale. He was out of place shadow in the already dark sky. “You’ve been running for so long. Just give in!”

Rey spit a strand of wet hair out of her mouth. She was tired of this. Of him: this sad, broken man who had pursued the Resistance, pursued  _ her  _ across the galaxy, and for what? Some deluded idea that she would run away with him? Become his ally? Help him spread his pain across the rest of the systems?

“Leave, Ben!” Rey had to shout to be heard above the planet’s storm. “Just leave! Everything’s gone--the First Order, Hux, your fleet, all of it. It’s just you! Just...go home.”

Ben took a step closer. 

“You know that isn’t an option. Not for me. Not anymore.”

She didn’t need the Force to feel what was in his eyes: his anger, his pain, all of it crashing down on him at once. And once she might have felt sorrow for this thing, because she understood the twisted story he had grown out of like a strangled and choking weed. Once, she might have been willing to let him reach out and touch her hand and try to find a lifeline back towards a soul. 

But sorrow was not the same thing as compassion.

He had murdered the only people who had ever felt like family to her, and had destroyed every chance she had given him to find a way back.

“It’s not just me,” Ben said, close enough now that she could see the rain mixing with the spittle flying from his mouth. “It’s you, too. Both of us. It always has been.”

She looked at him. A pale, scarred, scared man dressed in the costume of the fascists who had plunged the galaxy into darkness generation after generation.

“Leave me and my friends alone and never come back.”

“Please.” Ben took another step forward. “Please, Rey. I’m in so much pain. Everything I’ve done, I thought would fix it...everything I am, I am because of them. Snoke. Luke. My parents. My life was determined before I was even born. I’m asking you for your help--for the  _ Jedi’s  _ help. You know you can give it to me. Why won’t you?”

Rey closed her eyes, took a shaking breath.

“Because you tortured me and my friends. Because you killed Han Solo.” She opened them. “Because you shoved the love of my life one half step away from death.”

A flash of blue. A high, clear note. 

“Because you and your lackeys murdered a Temple’s worth of Jedi  _ children _ and drove the only man who could turn this war around into hiding. Because you have personally torn apart the fabric of countless civilizations, nations, and families across this galaxy and helped create the machine that destroyed the New Republic and  _ five planets _ full of innocent lives. 

“And if, after all of senseless war and rot and ruin, you expect to get anything,  _ anything  _ from me other than an offer of death or prison, much less compassion? Or  _ love _ ?” She laughed, low, under her breath. “Then you’ve been driven far more insane than Snoke could ever accomplish.”

“Rey...the Dark Side--”

“Understands its relationship to the Light. But you? You don’t understand anything. You’re just lost, and you kill people and expect to feel better but you don’t, so you take the hand that’s offering you a way out of the ocean and you pull your rescuer under the waves with you instead because deep down, you enjoy it. You thrive off it--the drowning.” 

“Rey--”

“Last chance, Ben. Get off my ship or spend the rest of your life in a cell. Possibly down one or two limbs.”

And just like that, all the sorrow and twisted grief slid off Ben’s face, so fast and easy it chilled Rey to see. The guise fell to the cruiser’s hull and washed away in the rain.

An equal flash of red. The tortured breathing of his lightsaber’s cracked crystals.

They stared at each other.

It was Ben who made the first move.

He yelled a guttural war cry and threw himself at her, all of his weight behind a viscous red slash. Rey dropped to her knees and slid across the slick surface, heard the saber bite into the metal hull where her body had been just a half-second before.

She straightened up behind Ben and thrust her lightsaber forward with both hands, just like she had the first time. 

He turned, caught her blade on his own, twisted, and dragged her in close. 

“Do you feel it?” He hissed, face an inch away from hers. “Our stories converging? The Force  _ wanted  _ this to happen. The stars have been crossing, orchestrating the intersection of our lives since birth. The Force desires our balance.”

She had to be careful of his cross-guards, already rotating to try and bite into her shoulder. But more than anything, Rey was tired. Tired of Ben, tired of this, all of it. 

“No,” she said, and lashed out with her boot. She caught Ben in the ribs and he grunted and the strength behind his blade sagged, just for a moment. Just a moment, but it was enough; Rey split apart and held him at blade’s length. “The Force is not a tool, or an entity to be enslaved for you genocide. The Force does not want balance. It  _ is  _ the balance.”

Once more. Once more the sizzling of their saber blades as the white-hot plasma met, clashing again and again as Rey spun and slashed and parried away Ben’s strikes. Once, he had seemed a boogeyman to her, his red saber and brute strength a terrifying reminder of the Dark Side. 

Once. But now he was only a man. Stripped of his mask and the might of the First Order, any power he might have once held over Rey was long gone. She was not the same lonely scavenger he had kidnapped and interrogated and tortured; she was not even the lost and angry Jedi-in-training he had manipulated so easily. The war had been long. It had changed them all--Poe from a hero into a leader; Finn from a deserter into her rock. 

And herself?

What had she become?

A starboard exhaust vent gurgled and shot a pillar of white flame into the air not a foot from Rey’s elbow; they were climbing ever higher into the atmosphere and it was beginning to get harder to breathe. She needed to finish this.

No sooner had the thought crossed Rey’s mind than a whiplash of Force energy threw her off her feet and sent her careening across the slick hull. Rey slammed her saber into the ship and held onto it so hard she was sure the hilt’s patterns would be embedded in her palms. Her legs swung out over the side of the ship before she finally came to a halt; where she had slid was a glowing, angry orange line of molten metal.

And stalking towards her, Ben.

Rey scrabbled for purchase on the edge, only just making it up and over before Ben was on her, a sizzling lightsaber in her face.

“You read their texts. You know the fate of the rest of the Jedi. Now you can join them.”

Rey just gritted her teeth, meditating. 

“All this time and you’re out of insults? I won’t ask again: come with me now, or you die here.”

A wave of nausea as she felt him in the Force, squeezing her body on all sides in a vice grip more suffocating than the deepest pit she had ever scavenged in. 

“Get. Off. Me.” Rey spat through her teeth. “Now.”

Mentally, she flexed her muscles and tore through his bindings, shredding the paralysis as easy as she would brush an insect from her shoulder. The toll it took on Ben was plain; his face drained of any color it might have had and he stumbled back under Rey’s renewed onslaught, her saber arcing in flowing, powerful blows. Behind Ben the sun was beginning to break through the storm clouds, the rain lessening, and the pink light felt warm and good on Rey’s skin.

“You told me I had nobody to go back to just so I could go forward with you.” Every word was an attack, and his body was getting weaker and weaker. But Rey only felt invigorated. “You told me I had no home. You tried to break me down and make me feel like less than nothing just so you could build me back up in your image.”

A chink in his defense; Rey’s blade flew through and bit into Ben’s shoulder. He cried out, tripped, and was rewarded with another cut on his abdomen. 

“But you are  _ not  _ my god, and that is  _ not  _ how love works. I should know. Because even though I had no family, I made my own. And it is kind, and caring, and  _ good _ .”

On the last word, Rey sent a ripple through the Force, which was picked up by something greater than herself more numerous than the stars, and amplified into a wave that knocked Ben on his back. 

Rey stood over him. 

“You tortured me and my friends. You killed Han Solo. You shoved the love of my life one half step away from death. But you will never touch any of them again.”

He was on his back, panting in pain, wounds slightly steaming. His lightsaber had skittered over somewhere out of reach, and most of his long, thick hair had been cut off by a stray saber strike.

Kylo Ren was no more.

“You.” Ben spit at her. “The most powerful child the Force has seen in a generation, and you throw away the only shot at order this galaxy’s going to get. Vader would be disappointed in you.” He closed his eyes, and maybe he had learned something, because he appeared to be meditating.

Where they had once stung, all of his acid words meant nothing to her anymore. Rey undid a cord of leather from her wrist to bind him with. All she wanted to do now was sit next to Finn and Poe and Rose and watch the sunrise. It had been a long time since they had all had the luxury of simply existing peacefully in the same space together and just...talk. Laugh. Lean on each other and smile at how entrancing the world was.

Maybe now they would have a lifetime worth of days to do it. 

“Give me your hands, Ben. I don’t want to--”

“Guide me, grandfather.”

Rey heard the characteristic sound of the saber igniting long before it flew toward Ben’s outstretched hand. He snarled and all at once was up again, reaching out--

Her blade was moving before he could ever see it.

Ben’s hand fell away from his wrist, the wet noise of it plopping to the ground lost in his scream of agony, followed by the stench of burning flesh. He dropped to his knees, clutching his stump to his chest. Shuddering breaths wracked his frame. 

The rain kept drizzling, oblivious.

“I’ll kill them,” Ben spluttered. His eyes were rimmed red, face shot through with vessels colored red, mouth dribbling red. “Your friends. You’ll be all alone again, and then you won’t have a choice. I’ll step over every single one of their bodies to get to you, if I have to.”

It was then that Rey realized. And in realizing, was saddened, because she had hoped it would never have come to this. The long and terrible game the two of them had played for so long was reaching its conclusion; there had never been any other way for this to end. She knew that now.

Ray walked forward until she was standing over Ben’s hunched back. 

And even now, at the end, he didn’t stop. Sensing she was close, Ben lunged and lashed out with his remaining hand, sending tendrils of the Force flying toward her, wrapping themselves around her throat--

\--but Rey cocked her head and snapped them off easily, nearly without effort. She caught Ben’s forearm and yanked him off balance. At the same time she twisted his arm so his body tensed up like a corkscrew; if it moved, it could cause him great pain.

She looked into his eyes. 

“You could have carried on Leia’s legacy and instead you chose Vader. Her voice was thick. As Rey spoke, her free hand moved with purpose towards her saber. You want to be so much like your grandfather, fine. Do you know what the last thing he ever did was?”

“What? Tell me.”

Rey never broke their gaze. She owed him nothing, but she would give him this. The Light flowed through her, helping her understand the scope of what she must do. And she let the Dark meet it, balance it, give her the strength to do it. 

“He died.”

A flash of blue. A high, clear note.

The blade erupted through Ben’s sternum and out his back. He choked, eyes widening and spittle flying from his lips and Rey had never felt such a void of the Dark Side as she did in that moment, not even in the bowels of Ach-To.

 

In the end, there were no final words. Involuntary twitches rippled across Ben’s face, his mouth gaping and closing, searching for something it would not find, filling more and more with blood. The stench of burning flesh and organs coiled in the air. Death was not a pretty thing, but Rey would watch it. Not for Ben’s sake--but for Leia and Han’s. After a time, Leia had known this moment would have to come, and she had confided in Rey as much. And she had made a promise.

She did not intend to break it.

Ben’s body began to fall away. Rey’s lightsaber, held in place, vivisected through his chest and collarbone and shoulder as easy as a searchlight cutting through the night. Part of Rey expected him to fade into nothing, as stories of the old Jedi had told, but he didn’t. Ben had worked all his adult life to turn himself into a specter, a wraith out of a nightmare to haunt the Resistance.

But in the end, he was just a body. 

 

**

 

Rey knew they would jettison him wrapped in cloth without a funeral, the same way they did with any First Order soldier who died aboard a Resistance Ship. Part of her was tempted to try and change Poe’s mind, but she knew that it would be the proper burial; though she called him Ben, the man who wore that name had been long gone. It was only force of habit and revulsion to his other name that kept her using the old one. 

No, there would be no tearful mourning or flowers or speeches. Even if either of his parents had been alive, Rey wasn’t sure that’s what they would have wanted anyway. 

But there was one thing she needed to do.

Before anyone had come to take the body away, Rey had tucked Ben’s lightsaber away in her tool pouch. Now, in the safety of her cabin aboard the cruiser, she knelt over the weapon. Even being near it made her sick to her stomach. Though its owner was gone, the weapon still emanated a powerful aura that whispered sinister things in her ear and dragged her back to that cave beneath the island. But Rey stood steady against the undercurrent, and plied open the lateral hatch. The metal was old and looked like it hadn’t really been taken care of. All the same, the hatch came loose eventually. 

And there it was.

Rey concentrated on the kyber crystal and watched it rise out of its holding cell, spinning slowly in midair. It pulsed red and throbbed with heat like a dying heart. She didn’t want to touch it, but she knew she must. The crystal settled down in her cupped palms.

A torrent of the Dark nearly swept her off her feet. 

It was all Rey could do to not yell, or cry or scream or hurl the crystal against the wall. Instead, she squeezed her fingers tighter around it and pushed deeper, past all of the tormented visions it was trying to show her. She had been taught by the Jedi texts about kyber crystals--how red was not their natural color, how Sith took an innocent crystal and made it bleed, twisted it with agony until the crystal turned crimson. Bled crystals were dangerous things. If she could prevent one from falling into the wrong hands, a great deal of misery might be averted.

“You can rest now,” she whispered to it, rogue tears running down her face at the strain of withstanding the incredible pulses of nerve-burning pain. “You can rest. He’s gone. He’s gone.”

Rey began to push again, not with her muscles but with the Force, creating an ever-contracting globe of energy that squeezed down to nothing. She felt it crumbling away, all of it: the crystal, its memories, all of the hatred and loathing Ben had poured into it and into her for so, so long. Rey had nearly forgotten what it was like before Ben’s shadow had detached itself from the cold stars above Jakku.

When she opened her hands, white dust poured from between her fingers, disappearing into nothing before it could reach the floor. 

It was over.

“Hey.” There was a knock on the inside of her door, and then two hands on her shoulders and a familiar chin in the crook of her neck. “Poe and I are going to go watch this sunrise on the viewing deck. Do you wanna come?”

Rey let go of a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Leaning back into Finn’s warmth, letting it wash over all of the terrible things the crystal had tried to show her--it felt good. Better than good. 

“Hello? Rey? We should probably go if we’re going to go. The light’s too beautiful to miss.”

“Yeah,” she said, putting her hand in Finn’s and letting him pull her to her feet. “Yeah, I know.”


End file.
